Joseph Kony

Joseph Kony (August 1961-) was the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) Christian fundamentalist guerrilla group in Uganda. He was most famous for his conscription of children into the LRA during its struggle against the Ugandan government.

Biography
Joseph Kony was born in August 1961 in Odek, Uganda, the son of a Catholic father and an Anglican mother. He was an altar boy for the church until he was fifteen, when he also dropped out of school. In 1995, he came to prominence as a member of Alice Auma's Holy Spirit Movement rebel group, which sought to overthrow Yoweri Museveni's brutal dictatorship and create a Christian theocracy in Uganda. He became the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army guerrilla group, and he forced children to fight for the LRA as soldiers, while he forced young girls to become sex slaves. By 2015, 100,000 people had been killed by the LRA, while 60,000 children had been kidnapped by the group. The numbers of the group waxed and waned over the years, but it had no more than a few hundred soldiers in the 2010s. The Central African Republic's president Michel Djotodia intended to negotiate Kony's surrender, as Kony was reportedly in failing health by 2013. However, the insurgency continued on a small scale for the next few years.